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& Transcript | Readers' Forum
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To The Editor:
You can say at least one thing about Daniel Leblanc's rebuttal to my recent
letter in the Times & Transcript: he certainly has a theme. Let's see what
evidence Mr. LeBlanc uses to discredit his foes: "Andrew Daley, a nuclear
industry follower from
Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing that while I have lived and worked in
the greater Toronto area for almost a year, I spent the first 24 years of my
life in the same city where I was born and raised: Saint John, New Brunswick.
Except of course for the three years in
If you'll indulge me, I'd also like to say "hello" to all my aunts,
uncles, cousins, and friends living in the
Make no mistake about it Mr. LeBlanc: I care deeply about my native province as
well as the environment all over the world. I am not a "nuclear industry
follower," I am primarily an environmentalist and got interested in the
nuclear industry (and studied it in university) because of its obvious benefits
in this regard.
Mr. LeBlanc accuses me of having a backwards and exaggerated view of Point Lepreau's reliability. The numbers don't lie,
its capacity factor of 82 per cent speaks for itself. I do however find his car
analogy interesting. What happens if you don't change the oil in your car every
5000 km? It certainly won't last as long as a car that is well maintained!
That's the reason Lepreau is in such bad shape now. .
. it ran so well in the glory days that poor management practices led them to
say, "We don't need to change the oil, its running fine!"
It may not last as long as expected but the exaggeration is in Mr. LeBlanc's assumption
that 40 years was the design life. Not so, and
pressure tube replacement is a planned part of CANDU life cycle management. He
is right in asserting this has never been done on a CANDU 6. Point Lepreau was
the first of these in the world. However pressure tube
replacement was successfully carried out at
I also stand accused of ignoring the emergence of wind power and energy
efficiency and ridiculing wind power. This is obviously not my intention, as is
evident from my very first sentence where I proclaimed the wind study as a
"great step." In fact nobody that I know from the nuclear industry is
trying to stop the development of wind power, or improvements in energy
efficiency. Most of the nuclear community (myself included)
that I know is actually strongly in favour of these things. What I (and
many others) am doing is trying to inject some realism into the situation. As
my
Even the Canadian Wind Association (Mr. LeBlanc provided the website)
acknowledges this with their estimates of wind power potential which, although
optimistic, are much lower than the claims of many environmental groups.
Similarly energy efficiency is not a magic solution. The laws of thermodynamics
ensure this is so; anything to do with energy or electricity will have losses,
and always will. Defending nuclear power in a newspaper letter is an uphill
battle. Against us are years of anti-nuclear dogma which is easily spread in
the form of sound bites. For us is the science and the
fact that Point Lepreau avoids the production of three million tonnes of
greenhouse gases and air pollution every single year.
Please educate yourself on nuclear power, the
definitive Canadian source of information is www.nuclearfaq.ca
Andrew Daley,
(Via Canadaeast.com)